This application relates in general to software and more specifically to systems, methods, and user interfaces for facilitating mapping organizational relationships and access privileges between database structures and folder structures.
Methods for synchronizing database structures and folder structures are particularly important in enterprise computing environments, where lack of synchronization and organization can create costly inefficiencies. Conventionally, synchronization between database structures and folder structures is performed manually.
An example enterprise computing environment includes various database applications that are part of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in combination with an independent Document Management System (DMS). The ERP databases may organize data and relationships via relational databases, while the DMS may maintain content, e.g., documents, via a folder structure of a file system or other persistent storage mechanism.
The DMS may maintain various files, such as scanned receipts, contracts, and other documents in a folder structure of a file system or other persistent storage mechanism. The folder structure may have various folders for different types of documents. Generally, the folders may be arbitrarily created, e.g., by a DMS administrator, such that no particular referential integrity or other organizational relationships must be maintained between folders. The data maintained in such a DMS is said to represent unstructured content. For the purposes of the present discussion, unstructured content may be any content that includes documents maintained in a folder structure of a file system or other persistent storage mechanism.
The databases of an ERP system may include various database objects, such as tables, which may reference other related tables or database objects within the database. For example, a database of a Supply Chain Management (SCM) component of an ERP software package may include a table pertaining to registered accounts, which refers to a table pertaining to suppliers, which refers to a table pertaining to payable invoices, which includes a record for a particular payable invoice, and so on. The invoice record maintained via the ERP system may have a corresponding scanned invoice maintained via the DMS. Various database objects, e.g., tables, invoice records, and so on, of a database are said to represent structured content, since the access to the content is via the predefined database structure, which may enforce referential integrity between tables, and so on. For the purposes of the present discussion, structured content may be any content maintained by a relational database or other software application designed to reference data in a file system or other persistent data storage mechanism.
Generally, for organizational purposes, businesses may manually attempt to have the folder structure of a DMS reflect the database structure of the ERP applications. However, an administrator or other authorized user of a DMS may be unable to accurately manually adjust the folder structure to match a rapidly changing database of an ERP. Furthermore, a DMS administrator may not immediately know how to adjust folder access rights when a new folder is created to reflect changes in an ERP database structure, especially when access rights of certain employees may have changed.
For example, an accounts payable administrator may wish to create a new folder when a new supplier is identified in an ERP application. Similarly, an administrator of a given business unit may wish to create a new folder structure in the DMS when a business unit engages in a new business function for which corresponding unstructured content will be stored in the DMS. Manual performance of such tasks may be undesirably time-consuming and error prone.